Podcast: Dialectic
Episode: 50: Tyler Cowen & Nabeel Qureshi - An Appetite For More
Release date: 2026-06-30

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Tyler Cowen (Website, X, Marginal Revolution, Conversations with Tyler is an economist at George Mason University, leads the Mercatus Center, and is the author of many books including The Great Stagnation and Average Is Over. He has blogged nearly daily at Marginal Revolution for over 20 years, has interviewed hundreds of world-experts on Conversations with Tyler, and runs Emergent Ventures, a prolific grants program that has funded multiple Dialectic guests.

Nabeel S. Qureshi (Website, X, Substack is an entrepreneur, writer, and researcher. He runs a stealth startup. Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar at Mercatus and spent nearly eight years at Palantir. He writes some of my favorite essays, including "What Makes Art Great" and "Rented Virtue", and was previously a guest on Dialectic for episode 13: "The Will to Care."

Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.

Please enjoy, and thank you for supporting, listening, and watching through fifty episodes of Dialectic. I can't wait for the next fifty!

Transcript and all links: dialectic.fm/tyler-nabeel

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion's new developer platform and workers here. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps:

(0:00) Opening Highlights
(1:18) Intro to Tyler & Nabeel
(3:02) Thanks to Notion
(4:38) Start: Sacred Commitments, AI, Markets, and Acceleration
(20:23) How Art Moves Us
(27:08) "Beauty," Strangeness, Great Art, Music, and The Beatles
(44:09) Film, Critics, Learning to Appreciate Depth, More Music, "Lowbrow" Art
(1:02:25) New Aesthetics, Sources of Inspiration, Optimism & Pessimism
(1:11:22) The Internet & Twitter's Virtue, Group Chats, and Cities
(1:21:35) Mentors, (Possibly Quitting) Writing Books, Friendship
(1:34:54) Interviewing, Identifying Talent, and Agency
(1:47:21) Closing Questions
(1:53:38) Thanks Again to Notion